Seminal events around the world this year, along with the pandemic have changed pretty much everything. But despite all of the upheaval, chaos and interruptions to normal life, people still want to travel and business leaders still want to know which cities offer the best live/work opportunities. And that means lot’s of rankings of the world’s best cities. The most recent entry has some surprising results as there aren’t as many Asian cities on the list of the World’s Best cities. 

Resonance Consultancy recently announced the world’s 100 top-performing cities in their annual World’s Best Cities Report which seeks to quantify and benchmark the relative quality of place, reputation and competitive identity for the world’s principal cities with metropolitan populations of one million or more. 

“The World’s Best Cities rankings are composed of experiential factors that people consider most important in choosing a city to live and visit, as well as empirical factors that business decision-makers consider important for business or investment,” says Resonance President & CEO Chris Fair.

As a result, Resonance’s Best Cities rankings don’t just consider cities as places to live, work or visit, but take a more holistic approach using a wide range of factors that show positive correlations with attracting employment, investment and/or visitors. These range from the number of culinary experiences and museums, to the number of Global 500 corporations, direct flight connections and mentions each city has on Instagram.

Based on each city’s performance in the 25 factors analyzed, these are the World’s Best Cities for 2021:

1) London, England
2) New York City, USA
3) Paris, France
4) Moscow, Russia
5) Tokyo, Japan
6) Dubai, United Arab Emirates
7) Singapore, Republic of Singapore
8) Barcelona, Spain
9) Los Angeles, USA
10) Madrid, Spain

The full ranking of the top 100 cities is available at BestCities.org/Reports/2021-Worlds-Best-Cities/

“The data collected for this year’s rankings provides a snapshot of the performance of these cities leading into the pandemic,” says Resonance President & CEO Chris Fair. “A year from now, we’ll be able to look at how COVID-19 has affected each of these cities and see which ones prove to be the most resilient during this crisis.”

Given the poor performance of cities like London and Madrid in containing the pandemic, we’re a little surprised to see them on the list. Don’t get us wrong, we love these cities, but in 2020 we’d probably replace them with Seoul and Taipei. And we’d expect to see more Asian cities on the list of the World’s Best cities in the top 10.